Google Analytics has been rolling out new features pretty fast recently so I thought it might be a good idea to create a wishlist of features people want.
Mine are below, add yours in the comments.
- Real time reporting
- Ability to “move” an account from one login to another (for those poor clients whose data is owned by the web design company)
- An API that isn’t limited to 10,000 rows of data – why not give us all our data?
- Make exact keywords show up without using a filter
- Show average ranking data (the same as in webmaster tools) in the organic keywords report
- Funnel analysis to show more than just the last click
Any other ideas?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }
The ability to change timezones would be nice
Oh and proper handling of currencies for goals (there are workarounds but they are complex)
The ability to export a live dashboard to a third party site would be handy so you can show live stats to higher ups.
The Google Suggest keywords that users clicked on, and the original keyword they typed. There’s a workaround to get this info in your ‘User Defined’ report, but it’d be nice to have this as a standard report.
Ability to link more than one Adwords account to an Analytics account. This would be useful for e.g. websites who have one agency managing paid search on the search network, and another agency managing paid search on the content network (under separate accounts).
The ability to easily track what a visitors search keyword referral history is, so to avoid the last click wins scenerio. Currently you need to setup a load of filters, segments, cookies and the kitchen sink to do this (I believe).
remove 200k pageview limit on advanced segments filtering (’sampled data’).
I just want the data to look the same from one page view to the next… seriously
You switch from a 1 month view to 3 month and the numbers change
You delve seep and the numbers change or frequently return zero results
Estimated traffic results on high traffic sites that are meaningless when you actually delve deeper
Google Ad manager + Adsense + Analytics = totally screwed up
Ability to let people access Analytics data without associated Adsense (I haven’t seen a way to do it anyway)
Improved cross linking when you go deep, so when looking at Keyword >>> landingpage you can click across to landingpage >>> keyword
Find me on Twitter
1: Ability to add “sticky notes” to profiles so that you can note starts of campaigns etc.
More comments from Robert Nicholson2: Easier ability to exclude ip’s/users from GA – ie a custom “visit this page to exclude your traffic” page for each profile.
3: Standalone dashboards – would be great to be able to export dashboards in an iframe or such for higher ups, eg. insert a dashboard into an intranet – without having to teach them how to login and use Google Analytics.
4: Integrate more webmaster tools data into GA – similar as to pulling in adwords cost data.
The option to track Yahoo and Adcenter PPC campaigns the same way as with Adwords.
Find me on Digg | Facebook | Reddit | StumbleUpon | Twitter
Thanks for the post and for sharing the Google analytics new features here, great post.
More comments from tag44For their own search engine, add a report showing the SERP page and position per keyword! They’ve got this data, they need to share it.
Find me on Twitter
I’ve wondered for a while whether what Google is using Wave to test out the technology to deliver real-time stats in Analytics…
More comments from DavidExcellent, a few of mine (like annotations) are due to be addressed soon, but a few more.
1) As Andy says, consistent data for large traffic sites/spikes
Auto annotation of higher/lowest/average figures within graphed data range (e.g. visitor numbers)
2) Better management/sharing of custom reports when manging multiple accounts
3) Ability to group accounts together e.g. by client / type
4) Auto create a number of profiles / user defined set of profiles for a new account to avoid endless recreation
5) MAIN ONE – Standard timeframes / comparison selection (e.g. “this month, last 6 months, compare month year on year”
6) Better (some) trending info overlay
7) Ability to change defult view on reports e.g. Ecommerce report defaults to Conversion rate, constantly changing to revenue
9) Automatic tagging of visitors via Google one box/news/realtime/maps/pages from CountryX/video/blog search/product list/whatever they release into universal SERPs next. (I’m not talking subdomain searches.)
10) Refund adjustments under eCommerce that’s a) easy b) backdated
11) Ability to cross compare profiles within the same account e.g. niche sites with their own code, but compare 5 together for same metric.
12) Keyword numbers graphed by date range rather than having to manually select month on month.
13) Consistent definition between “search engine” and “referring site”
14) Reporting of search partner PPC segment (might be available, does anyone know how to get it?)
15) Option to keep segment (e.g. Non-paid) consistent when moving across multiple reports.
16) Ability to set default view numbers for everything so you don’t have to reselect them every time e.g. Initial account view / row data
17) Report/filter by IP address on the fly (catch competitors / filter out consistent bouncers etc)
Phew. OK, that’s a few to get started with, although some might be hiding away or have workarounds I don’t know about yet
I love #9 on Ian’s list. One more I thought of – the ability to set the default week to Monday through Sunday which would match AdWords.
Live updates and more up-to-date updated data
I’d like to be able to view more than 3 advanced segments on a report in one go, maybe a limit up to say 5 or 10 would be nice
Dear Santa Google,
I’m going to echo Robert’s suggestion of standalone dashboards here. Intranet dashboard integration would be ace, as would a desktop widget (hello Google, Web Trends has done customised desktop widgets for some clients, come on guys).
My other wish is for Google to lighten up with the whole data privacy thing. You and I may have dynamic IP addresses, but most companies have static ones. We use Revelations to see the “who” that is doing what. It would be really cool if analytics could give up corporate roll-ups of data, or even sector trending patterns. At least give us that! It would go a long way to a clear picture of who is on your site, and do you want to exclude them from your reporting or not.
And can I make an Adwords wish too? Please, I’ve been ever so good this year. Can we have a content network that is at least semi-semantically intelligent? If I build a campaign around the phrase “energy quotes” and 90% of my key phrases are phrase or exact match, can you please not put my ads in the content network for inspirational and religious quotes? My clients really don’t like paying for irrelevant traffic.
Extra cookies and milk will be in the usual spot, thank you.
My wishlist will be
1. Realtime data. No delay at all
2. Also be able to track adsense performance.
3. Accurate data.
Thanks for the post this would be nice, great post.
More comments from valueshopFind me on Twitter
GA appears to calculate time spent on a page as the time between the firing of the GA scripts at the bottom of the pages on the site. This is a sensible approach, of course, but means that the last page in a visit has a recorded time spent of zero.
You can check this by analysing your 1-page visits for time spent on the page. They are all zero.
This is obviously a real problem when you want to differentiate between people who bailed immediately to another site, and people who sent a while reading the page, before going elsewhere, their need perfectly satisfied.
I have no good solution to this apart from transferring data every few seconds instead of once per page visit. This may simply be too great a load. Ah well.
More comments from Liam McGeeFind me on Digg | Reddit | StumbleUpon | Twitter
Thanks dude, There is nothing to say more now! few is cited by you and few are cited in comments. Cheers!
More comments from ramesollinSome super ideas from everyone.
I would like Google to support analytics dashboard as an iphone application and the ability to report on visitors from Google Product search
I’m a newbie for seo. I also have a Google account, but I haven’t understood the entire features of GA. So, thank you for sharing. BTW my favarite feature is map overlay, through which I can find who visit my blog. It’s an exciting feature.
Find me on Facebook | Twitter
Real time reporting and more accurate data are my wishes. I hope Google check this post and make up a to do list.
More comments from webdesignsurreyLeave a Comment (registration is optional)